Kyber raises $5 million to build infrastructure for physical AI

Kyber, a Paris-based startup, has raised a $5 million funding round led by Lightspeed to develop an infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time. The investment from Lightspeed, an American venture capital firm that has also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI, targets the sector of physical AI—which refers to artificial intelligence systems that interact directly with the physical world. Lightspeed noted that physical AI’s quality depends entirely on the underlying systems running it. Kyber’s core software is an SDK, or software development kit, designed to synchronize video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal latency.

The startup was founded by French entrepreneur Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer of VLC Media Player, an open-source video software that has been downloaded more than 6 billion times. Kempf is convinced that hundreds of millions of robots and drones will be roaming the streets in a few years. He is leveraging his background in video-streaming technology—including work at cloud gaming startup Shadow—to solve latency issues for remote operations. Kempf explained that the platform is designed for scenarios where the operator, the computing power, and the physical action are all in separate locations. He added that when controlling physical objects in the real world, every millisecond matters.

Kyber currently employs 25 full-time staffers, including forward-deployed engineers (FDEs)—technical professionals who handle hands-on deployments for clients. While headquartered in Paris, the company has offices in San Francisco and Singapore to support what it expects will be a global client base. Kyber is positioning its SDK to manage fleets of robots and drones, offering a productized version of the custom solutions that are currently fragmented across the industry. Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer, points out that existing remote-control solutions are limited in scale: “But the largest fleets today have maybe 2,000 or 3,000 vehicles. Imagine you need to manage millions of them; that’s not the same thing.” To address this, Kyber’s core project is open source, meaning its user base will likely span far more companies than will ever become paying customers. The company’s careers page states that while other firms spent years and tens of millions of dollars building custom solutions they will never share, Kyber is developing a version for everyone to use.

Why it matters

Kyber is building an infrastructure layer for real-time remote device control, aiming to solve the synchronization challenges for the expected rise of physical AI and large-scale robotics fleets.